Billionaire Control, Part One: NCSA and Affiliates

When one organization is funding the anti-school choice talking points that will be used by other advocacy organizations, and it has a marketing propaganda arm spending millions to reinforce its messaging to the public in Nebraska (NElovesPS), we should take a step back and look carefully at what’s going on.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the often hidden money controlling Nebraska’s education system with funding trails from the Sherwood Foundation, a nonprofit funded by Warren Buffett using Berkshire Hathaway stock, and run by his daughter, Susie Buffett.  The Sherwood Foundation funds other non-profits to the tune of over $140 million a year.

Nebraska Public Schools Coalition
In 2016, the Sherwood Foundation donated $25,000 directly to the Nebraska Public Schools Coalition (NPSC), according to their IRS 990 filing.  That same year, NPSC also received $125,000 in funding from Nebraska Appleseed, which itself is funded by the Sherwood Foundation. This nonprofit-to-nonprofit funding scheme is used again and again, making it difficult for the public to see exactly how much money is being funneled to influencers from one billionaire source.

In the Fall 2016 issue of NCSA Today (the quarterly publication produced by the Nebraska Council of School Administrators), Ann Hunter-Pirtle, Executive Director for the non-profit Stand for Schools (which is also funded by the Sherwood Foundation), invited Nebraska K-12 administrators to support this new organization aimed at squashing school choice efforts in the state. The NCSA article is full of false allegations.

For instance, Hunter-Pirtle says that charter schools “take public funds away from public schools.” Charter schools are public schools, so this argument is nonsense. She also alleges that charter schools “have led to widespread fraud, corruption, and abuse in states where they exist.” If this were true, the 45 states that have 3.1 million students in more than 6,800 charter schools would be scaling back instead of expanding charter school offerings, and the millions of kids on wait lists for charter schools would remove their names from said lists.

These aren’t the only false allegations made by Hunter-Pirtle in this piece, and we find it disturbing that the NCSA would publish information that runs counter to the peer-reviewed research being published on this topic. We would hope that our public school administrators would take a more scientific and less ideological view of education. But then again, the Sherwood Foundation also gave an impressive amount of money to NCSA in 2016: $255,000.

Nebraska Council of School Administrators
And speaking of the National Council of School Administrators (NCSA), let’s take a shallow dive into their organization. Their current homepage features a slideshow. Here are screenshots of some of their slides.

Here are the NCSA Ambassadors, who are funded by the Sherwood Foundation, along with Bekah and Brittany from NE Loves Public Schools, which is funded by the Sherwood Foundation.

In the above photo, we see five affiliates from NCSA (funded by the Sherwood Foundation) with Commissioner Blomstedt from the Nebraska Department of Education (the Sherwood Foundation gave $68,750 to the Nebraska Department of Education in 2016).

In this photo, David Spinar and Renee Fry from OpenSky (which received $252,000 from the Sherwood Foundation in 2016) receive an award from the NCSA (which is funded by the Sherwood Foundation).

And in this photo, the NCSA Executive Board and staff (funded at least partially by the Sherwood Foundation) proudly wear their NE Loves PS t-shirts (funded by the Sherwood Foundation).

It’s a Facade
So what appears to be an impressive coalition of diverse groups supporting education in Nebraska is really a bunch of octopus tentacles powered by one powerful source. These Sherwood-funded nonprofits have expenses dedicated to lobbying declared on their IRS forms.   

​And Nebraska is a curious case. It’s a low-population state, but it has global money pouring in through the Buffett wealth machine. That makes the state unusually easy to control and monopolize. And if there were ever a state under the stranglehold of one powerful education monopoly for public education, that state is Nebraska.

It’s unclear why the Sherwood Foundation is so intent on preventing Nebraska families from accessing the same educational options that most families in the United States enjoy. And it’s disheartening to learn that so many Nebraska educators and administrators are willing to turn a blind eye to study after study showing the merits of school choice in exchange for donations to their organizations.

Join us as we further explore the dark money in Nebraska that is preventing children from accessing the educational opportunities available to most other children in the United States. There’s no reason we have to consent to allowing Dark Money to keep us in the Dark Ages.

Read On:
Part Two: Elected Officials
Part Three: Activism in the ESUs